Media Log version 2.0. Dan's Iron Rule of Technology posits that anything you try to do with a computer will take 10 times longer and be 10 times more difficult than you'd anticipated, no matter how simple it looked like going in. So it is with Media Log. No sooner had I got this up and running last week -- itself no mean feat, involving as it did firewalls, ftp passwords, and trial runs with several pieces of software, not all of which worked properly -- than I heard from Jay Fitzgerald, the former editor of the Boston Business Journal who writes Hub Blog. Hey, he wrote (I'm paraphrasing here). Where are your permalinks? No one will link to you without permalinks! My response: What the hell is a permalink?

As I quickly learned, a properly run weblog includes permalinks for each individual item so that other bloggers can link to you without having to worry that your item will have slid off the page before their readers can find it. They are also damn near impossible to produce with specialized blogging software. So, starting yesterday, I began producing Media Log with Blogger, a set of Web-based tools that automate much of the process. Media Log now includes automatically generated archives and permalinks, the latter signified by the little "link" thingie after each posting time. I also reposted the last week's items yesterday, with their original dates and times marked in gray.